Elijah David

Look at that cover art. Love it. Adore it. Last year, my friend Mirriam passed along a draft of her WIP, Paper Crowns , after I'd expressed an interest in reading some of her writing (specifically one having to do with wyslings). I flew through it, loving every minute. When she announced its imminent publication, I was overjoyed. I knew this was a book to be shared with the world, and now it would be. I've just finished my reading of the final, published version, and I'm pleased to say that I loved it even more the second time through. My initial impression of Paper Crowns , in summary, was "this is a fun, wild romp through Faerie." That impression still holds true. So why  should you read Paper Crowns ? The main characters are vibrant (both in the sense of being three-dimensional, and in the sense of Hal being a blue-furred cat). The secondary characters are worthy of their own books. (At least one gets his own sequel, still in the works.) The...

Beauty and the Beast I'm a sucker for true love conquers all and the transforming power of love. The Disney version of the tale was one of my favorites as a child and I've only grown to love this story's heart even more since then. Till We Have Faces , Lewis' retelling of "Cupid and Psyche" (itself an earlier form of "Beauty and the Beast"), is one of my favorite books of all time. I can't get enough of seeing people learn to love others more than themselves, especially when the other person is unlovable. That's Christ-like love, and it's powerful. The Six Swans/Seven Ravens I first encountered this story in an old VHS of fairy tale retellings (it also had a Robin Hood retelling and others I've forgotten). I remember the love of the heroine for her brothers and her perseverance in fulfilling the prescriptions for breaking the curse drawing me into the story like few I'd heard before. I certainly couldn't have kept...

When I first started reading Plenilune , I didn't really have any idea what it was about. I knew that I wanted to read it after finishing Mirriam's novel Monster (although I foolishly went on a trip without already having purchased Plenilune , so I had to delay it until I finished the book I started as soon as Monster was over, The Paper Magician ). I knew that I enjoyed reading Jenny's blog posts and that she was good friends with Mirriam. Other than that (and the tantalizing precis on Amazon's item page ), I was going in blind. The Prose But from the opening chapters, I was sucked in. The prose in this book is rich and wonderful. Biblical and Shakespearean references do more than pepper the story -- they flavor it through and through. The characters leap to life like those in Dickens and Austen. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that if you took Austen's books, melded them a bit with Burrough's planetary fantasy, and added a dash of C. S. Lewis, you...